Just What is Google Authorship?

By Matt Weston

If Google is your preferred search engine (as indeed it is for most web users) you might have noticed something a little different about it over the past year or so, compared to its previous incarnations.

With the increasing prominence of content marketing as an effective online marketing strategy, Google decided to assist companies with the advertisement of their content with the creation and launch of Google Authorship.

You might have heard of Google Authorship, but were put off investigating it fully once you encountered scary terms such as “algorithm”, “click through rates” and “Author Rank”.

So what, in simple terms, is Google Authorship, and how can it assist your business?

In recent years there has been a drive to better establish a connection between an author and their readership, and to increase the engagement between the two. Google Authorship is Google’s attempt at helping this process along.

You may have noticed that recently, when searching for something on Google, a number of links will be adorned with the author’s picture, their name, and how many Google+ circles they reside in.

This is Google Authorship, designed to display who the individual author of the content of a specific page is, so that more emphasis is based on the author rather than the website.

An increasing amount of high quality content produced by an individual will then positively affect their “Author Rank” metric, which is Google’s way of recording an author’s activity, credibility and engagement with others.

Other factors that can impact on an individual’s “Author Rank” include their engagement on Google+, the amount of comments their work receives, and the re-distribution of their content on social media platforms.

With a higher “Author Rank” figure comes a higher page ranking, which is, as many businesses understand, absolutely crucial in terms of making your content as visible to as many people as possible.

So that’s Google Authorship – quite simply, it’s a way to establish a connection between an author and their audience in a really accessible and highly visual manner.

For help setting up your Google Authorship account, it’s well worth checking out this webpage for step-by-step instructions.